Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's Opera Der Jasager

TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE KILLING OF A BOY: WEILL’S AND BRECHT’S DER JASAGER MICHAL GROVER-FRIEDLANDER We must understand that our formal ideal is fulfilled in the actualities of the stage; we must be convinced that a theatrical work is capable of reproducing the significant elements of our music; without reservation, we must commit ourselves to opera.1 Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Der Jasager (The Yes Sayer, 1930) is an exceptional case in terms of the transformations and modifications performed on a text on the way to becoming a libretto. To begin with, it is unclear which text the opera was modelled after. Brecht, who prepared the libretto, did not have direct access to the Japanese play on which the libretto is based and used a text twice removed from the Japanese source. By this point, the Japanese play, the original work, had substantially been altered. The Yes Sayer is also exceptional in that its source-play went through seven versions and each is an independent work. The opera is not the last version but the fifth; following its completion, Brecht revised the text of The Yes Sayer and then complemented it with a companion play, The No Sayer, for which Weill did not compose music. The following essay is not an exhaustive account of all the play’s transformations. Numerous aspects of these transformations have 1 Kurt Weill, “Commitment to Opera” (1925), trans. Kim Kowalke, in Kim Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe, Ann Arbor, MI, 1979, 458; originally published as “Bekenntnis zur Oper”, 25 Jahre neue Musik, Vienna: Jahrbuch 1925 der Universal-Edition, 226- 28. 382 Michal Grover-Friedlander already been thoroughly elucidated.2 Most of the scholarship has focused on Brecht’s revision of The Yes Sayer and on The No Sayer, that is, on the versions that come after the composition of the opera. Here, I mention only briefly some of the salient modifications performed on the play in the different versions and provide a slightly more detailed account of the operatic version. I also include an interpretation of it in performance. I concentrate on the versions leading up to and including the opera; the revision of The Yes Sayer and The No Sayer are dealt with only as they are foreshadowed by the opera. I end the essay with a comparison between each version’s take on what I consider to be the play’s central theme: the killing of a child. I argue that in the movement from one version to another, this death acquires different meanings. First, a catalogue of the versions: I. The Valley Rite (Taniko), a Noh play (fourteenth or fifteenth century).3 II. Arthur Waley’s English translation (1921) of The Valley Rite (Taniko). III. Elisabeth Hauptmann’s German translation (1929-30) of Waley’s translation of the Taniko. IV. Bertolt Brecht’s Der Jasager (The Yes Sayer) (1930), based on Hauptmann’s translation. V. Kurt Weill’s operatic setting (1930) of Brecht’s play Der Jasager, in which Weill makes a few changes to Brecht’s text. VI. Brecht’s revision of The Yes Sayer (1931).4 2 For all the texts, see Peter Szondi, Der Jasager und der Neinsager: Vorlagen, Fassunger und Materialien, Frankfurt, 1966. For a comparison of the various texts, see Zvi Tauber, “Two Lectures on Brecht’s The Yes Sayer and The No Sayer”, programme notes for performance of the opera at Tel Aviv University, 2010 (in Hebrew), and Andrzej Wirth, “Brecht and the Asiatic Model: The Secularization of Magical Rites”, Literature East and West, XV/4 (December 1971), 601-15. 3 The author is anonymous, according to Twenty Plays of the Nō Theatre, ed. Donald Keene, New York, 1970, 316. Arthur Waley attributes the play to Zeami Motokiyo(fourteenth century) in his Preface to The Nō Plays of Japan (1921), New York, 1957, 5. According to Wirth, “Brecht and the Asiatic Model”, the play was written by Zenchiku (fifteenth century). 4 The Yes Sayer was hailed by Fascists and condemned by the Left. This, claims Wirth, is why Brecht rewrote it and added as its complement The No Sayer. Wirth argues that a comparison should be made not between The Yes Sayer and The No Sayer but between the revised Yes Sayer and No Sayer taken together and the first .

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